Many sports and recreational games use spherical balls as part of the equipment of the game. One well-known example of such a game is croquet which uses a number of small wooden balls as part of the equipment thereof. Recently, a game which is known as boccie ball has become increasingly popular in the United States. Boccie ball has been popular for a number of years in other countries, most notably Italy where the game apparently originated. The game of boccie ball is a form of lawn bowling played in a relatively long and narrow court. The equipment for boccie ball includes eight relatively large balls of a first diameter and a second smaller ball of a second and smaller diameter.
To the best of Applicant's knowledge, the boccie ball sets which have been marketed have included no convenient means for storing or transporting the boccie balls themselves. Once the original package has been opened, each user of the boccie ball set has had to find his own particular system or apparatus for storing the balls. Typically, the balls are simply placed into an open box which box must be picked up to carry the balls from one location to another. The balls are, of course, free to roll around in the box making such an apparatus sometimes burdensome and inconvenient to use.
Various racks or holders have been developed over the years for holding diverse types of objects. With regard to spherically shaped objects, such as balls, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,756,901 to Cowsert and 3,908,825 to Ayoub et al are interest. These patents disclose devices in which the balls are generally held in vertically elongated rows with one ball resting on top of the other. Each row of balls is usually held between a base plate and an openable or removable cover at the other end of the row. However, these carriers are somewhat inconvenient to use in that each ball or object must be stacked or unstacked from the row individually. This can be a burdensome operation when the rows are deep. Furthermore, since each of the balls rests in contact with other balls, there is always the possibility that dropping the balls in the row will cause the balls to chip or otherwise be damaged.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,198,338 discloses a display rack for holding bowling balls. The display rack includes a plurality of vertically spaced turntables molded from plastic and having seats in which the bowling balls rest. However, the rack disclosed in this patent is not suitable for the situation where the balls should be transported from one location to another. This is so because the balls are not confined in the rack but only rest in their seats for display.
French Pat. No. 1,003,806 discloses a ball holder having two identical halves pivotted together along one side. The ball holder has two large recesses for holding two large balls and a small recess for holding a small ball. While the holder disclosed in this patent is capable of transporting the balls, a holder designed such as this for use in carrying the nine balls used in boccie ball would be quite large and bulky. This size problem would increase both the expense of manufacturing the holder and also the difficulty which a user would encounter in carrying the holder.